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March 28, 2004

Dear Sylvie,


this comic is for you. And also for everyone else, but somehow, you. Love, Gillie

Posted by me at 10:38 PM | Comments (1)

March 27, 2004

Functional Fixedness

Had a little "aha" moment just now as I was doing some cognition homework. We're reading about problem-solving, and I came across the concept of "functional fixedness," which often gets in people's way as they are trying to come up with solutions. It means an inability to see a variety of uses for an object. The best way I can think to explain it is in negatives, examples where people overcame their limited understanding of how an object can be used: that scene in Apollo 13 where they jerry-rig an air filter using a sock; the hairdresser who suggested cleaning up the Valdez oil slick with bags of cut hair; Watts Towers; etc.

It is functional fixedness which makes a number of text-based video games initially hard to play. Text-based games frequently require you to use objects in highly unorthodox ways; I think it could be said to be a major source of their challenge and entertainment value (entertaining provided you have a high tolerance for frustration, that is). Take Thy Dungeonman, for example. Early on in the game you pick up a chunk of moldy bread. Most people in well-fed communities don't eat moldy bread. Most people also don't eat unless they are hungry, and your character never expresses any hunger. So the moldy bread seems functionally useless, and it seems weird that you decide to pick it up and put it in your loincloth, where you're going to forget it unless you religiously check your inventory as you progress.

But this functional fixedness could keep you from winning the game. At one point you are going to be bitten by a rat carrying the bubonic plague -- you just can't avoid it; you can't get out of the dungeon otherwise. And if you don't overcome your usual ideas of what moldy bread does, you will eventually die of the plague. There are, of course, cues to suggest an item is useful -- the fact that the game does not allow you to not take the bread, or to put it down, but they don't necessarily point to where you're going to need to use the object. There are at least three other objects in the game -- a mop, a lollipop, and your loincloth -- whose apparent functional fixedness could also lose you the game.

Having read James Gee's book on literacies and video games, which does very little to address how video games make better learners outside of the gaming sphere, I've been struggling to identify broad skills which gamers develop that other people don't. I think overcoming functional fixedness is a very good candidate.

Text-based games definitely ask you to do more on this level than many games do these days. I think a lot of contemporary RPGs really dumb down and limit the amount of problem-solving you need to do at this level. Yes, it is a key, it's going to go in a lock. Sadly, the designers won't let you use it to choke the slavering beast who is now rushing at you with jaws wide; on him, you're going to have to use your thermonuclear gun-katana instead.

And actually, text-based games often sucked because of the amount of functional fixedness they asked you to overcome. For crying out loud, how was I supposed to know that if I didn't get the bag of peanuts, I was going to lose the Hitchhiker's Guide game when Arthur boarded the Vogon ship? The learning curve was pretty steep; the number of turns you had to solve the problem in was frequently too small for a beginning player.

BUT: if you played enough text-based games, there was no way you were going to approach a new problem and NOT think of overcoming functional fixedness. It was your first line of defense.

Whether and how this transfers to the real world remains to be seen; also, how this transfer can be encouraged. I think both the fixedness transcendance and the transfer would be worth researching.

Posted by me at 2:17 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

March 22, 2004

HAMMER SMASH!: A belated breakdown and synthesis of themes from the Princeton video games conference

Finally, a good two weeks after the Form, Culture, and Video Game Criticism conference at Princeton (link is to the speaker schedule), I've wrapped up an attempt to synthesize themes which came up at the conference, alongside themes which have arisen in my department surrounding video games.

The following is by no means a complete synopsis of the Princeton conference -- for that, check out Grand Text Auto's or buzzcut.com's recaps (and I recommend it). Rather, this is intended to spark some discussion in Teachers College's Communications, Computing, and Technology department about what aspects of video games interest us and perhaps how we want to work together.

Most people mentioned here spoke at the Princeton conference except where I've specified otherwise. I hope I'm not misrepresenting anything anyone said -- my notes are a little sketchy in places.

Posted by me at 10:16 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Genres

I have repeatedly heard it pointed out recently that talking about "video games," even games in general (see Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, Aphorism 66), is an oversimplification. Solitaire, football, and charades are all games. Likewise, the old Windows standard Minesweeper, the massively multiplayer online role-playing game EverQuest, and my own favorite game, the foot-controlled Dance Dance Revolution, are all known as "video games."

To make sweeping statements like "video games encourage violence" or to ask questions like "are video games really motivational?" in light of this starts to seem clumsy. There have been plenty of voices calling for a more nuanced understanding of video games, and yet somehow the frame in which many discussions of video games begin is simplistic (even Roger felt compelled to begin the Princeton conference by acknowledging these oversimplifications, saying "we are not here to condemn games or to defend them, but to interpret them.") I've been guilty of contributing to overgeneralization myself; I've been hyping a discussion of "video games" as such within the department without being more specific.

In the future I think we all need to acknowledge the diversity of computer-mediated games from the start, framing our discussions in terms of individual genres or even specific games. Do we mean shooters, card games, side-scrollers, simulations; handhelds, arcade consoles, or computer platforms? I'd hope this would open the door to discussing their more interesting elements rather than rehashing "violence" or "mindlessness" again and again.

So one possible task in my department would be to start talking about games by genre, and then more specifically categorizing them by design features to study how they interact with various cognitive and social abilities.

Posted by me at 10:14 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Specific design features to consider: Play spaces

Laurie Taylor, a PhD student at the University of Florida, discussed two kinds of play spaces in video games: smooth and striated. (She was drawing her definition from theory, but I came in late and didn't catch whose.) In striated space, every subsection of space and game pieces has meaning, as in chess. In smooth space, meanwhile, only specific points have meaning, and the path one takes between them is not important. She made it clear that both kinds of space could conceivably be found in one game, and cited Civilization as a game which includes both kinds of space. Different games may give space meaning in different ways; for example, she said, in a multiplayer game a space may be given its meaning by the community engaged in play or by the puzzle-solving or fighting which goes on there.

Implications? I dunno, haven't thought about them yet, but this is one axis of the dimensions of game space to consider, and vocabulary to describe it.

Posted by me at 10:13 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

A multilayered model

Nick Montfort, a PhD student at the University of Pennsylvania, referred to a multi-layered model for understanding video games which was developed by Lawrence Konzack. Konzack specified seven layers, but Montfort only dealt with five in his paper.

The five layers he discussed were:


In elaborating, Montfort made it clear that earlier levels of video games in this model enable and constrain later levels.

My immediate reaction as someone who is interested in the social and cognitive dynamics of learning was "hey, that last level needs to be unpacked!" Montfort's last level may be a condensation of Konzac's last three, for all I know. One way or another, the last level, reception and operation, ought to be expanded by various fields of human behavior study. But the other levels hold up well. Specifically, I think they are good distinctions to make in order to understand what people may need to know in order to play a video game, and what they do as they play it.

Let me give a few examples (making crude use of the minimal cognition and literacy vocabularies I have so far): In order to function in a community of gamers, a new player will need to understand certain things about the social meanings of a given platform (arcade games, Playstation, cel phone games, etc) and of various game forms (first-person shooters, puzzle games, side-scrollers). Montfort made the excellent point that the form of a platform itself tells the player about the social meaning of playing a game; for example, in the early days of home video games a console sold with two controllers, suggesting to potential buyers that play was a social event. Today, most home consoles sell with only one controller.

Moving on to the other levels, a certain amount of literacy in computer languages (code-level) might in some cases enhance gameplay, especially in games where you can modify characters, abilities, or scenarios by manipulating code. Certainly one needs to be literate in reading interfaces (symbols on controller buttons, cursors and menus onscreen) to play at all. One also needs to transfer appropriate parts of one's real-world knowledge, and of other games, to reading the specific iconography of the game world (FIRE BURN! HAMMER SMASH! MUSHROOM MAKE BIG! RED CARD ONLY ON BLACK CARD!) At the level of reception, if I understand it correctly, a player must develop gestalts for understanding onscreen movement (though as games become more realistic, maybe this is not as hard as it was back in the days when graphics only kinda looked like what they were supposed to look like ;))

Posted by me at 10:12 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Movie elements in video games

In discussing Tomb Raider's Lara Croft and "the male gaze," Jordan Hall, a masters student at York University, made some interesting points about the interrelation of movies and video games. She smartly pointed out that the objectification of the character in the movie, which has drawn some criticism, can't be considered as originating in the video game medium; the game was borrowing representative conventions from movies to begin with. She suggested that the metaphor of the camera (which another speaker noted is not really a camera at all in the space of a video game, not a device which records light input but rather image playback from a digital source rendered by code) has become an accepted way of delivering interaction with data. Hall also noted that full-motion video sequences act as "rewards" for successful gameplay.

This topic is very interesting to me personally. My concern is that in borrowing the conventions of media which invite very little active participation from the user, video games, websites, and other new media will fail to support or invite the full range of identities and ways of thinking they might make possible. Taking a camera-like feature for granted would be a bad idea in this light.

It was suggested, however, that the relationship between video games and movie conventions is going to be short-lived. The kind of directorial control game developers have in full-motion video clips is likely to give way to more and more player-controlled camera action. At that point, a cinematic understanding of what's onscreen is probably going to become less appropriate and less meaningful; certainly it will be more complicated.

Posted by me at 10:10 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Modelling and scaffolding expert thinking

Dennis Jerz, professor at Seton Hill University presented a paper on the history of Adventure, which I believe is acknowledged as the first text-based computer adventure game.

I found many concrete suggestions in Jerz's presentation for those of us looking to develop software to teach expert bodies of knowledge. Adventure was developed by a hobbyist spelunker as a way to introduce his daughters to the practice of caving. As such, the game scaffolds and models an expert's ways of seeing and exploring a cave.

Jerz pointed out that because they are limited to text written by the caver who developed the game, players only "see" the environment the way an expert caver would, noting salient features like exits, dangerous situations, etc. He interpreted other elements of the game, such as the disappearance of corpses of snakes and other "enemies," as representing elements of caving culture (take little and leave little behind), though these were more incidental to the demands of programming a simple and functional game at the time.

Modelling a domain of social knowlege in this way would be harder to do in a graphic game. Most of the RPGs I play have ways of denoting what's important, such as pointer icons, flashing objects, etc; you might also do something like highlighting salient objects or regions of the screen in yellow, gradually dimming them. However, my guess is it's more difficult to try to teach someone to develop an expert's way of looking at the world when you present them with a more detailed and confusing visual image than it is with carefully written text. One way or another I find it an interesting question to consider whether either a graphic or a text-based game can ensure that players are aware that they are receiving real-world expert information without having a human being there to explain it to them.

Jerz also described simulated caving rescues -- a practice which is a part of learning safety in the hobby -- as being sort of games in themselves, and described a puzzle within the game that revolved around assembling a brass lamp designed like one used in caving. I thought this was sort of an interesting thing to consider: which parts of an expert domain are already significantly gamelike enough to be turned into a game or puzzle onscreen?

Jerz made text-based games sound like an excellent way to model expert knowledge. Sadly, I just don't think text-based games are of interest to anyone but us old fogeys who played them as kids because there wasn't much else to play back then. Maybe if they were presented as something other than a game -- something more like a book -- maybe then bookish kids might go for it... I don't know. Maybe I'm also underestimating the potential of graphic games to accomplish the same things.

Posted by me at 10:09 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Identity and motivation to play

By this point there are a few models of how the player identifies with the character floating around; they could use some sorting out. James Paul Gee in his book suggests a three-part model -- character, player, and player-as-character.

We raised some questions along these lines the other day in John Black's seminar. What about games where there is no avatar to identify with, the classic exception-to-many-rules again being Tetris? How do you identify then? Is it appreciably different from the engagement you experience when playing a game in which you have an avatar?

(A few more questions off the top of my head: If particular players strongly feel that their identity is unitary and inflexible, do they not not gravitate towards games in which identification with a character is central to play? Or if they do, do they play differently? And finally, how does your level of agency affect how your identity is enlisted in play?)

Someone in Black's practicum raised the question of why puzzle and computer card games are more motivating to some people than to others. I have heard it mentioned a few times lately that card players actually make up the largest percentage of computer game players; in that light, it's worth trying to tease out the range of purposes that video games serve in various players' lives.

One aspect of this is the social meaning of video gaming in general. Peter Bell, a researcher for the Pew Internet and American Life project, brought up that adult gamers, a growing group, have to contend with the childish image associated with video gaming. This is being made easier by the incorporation of games into cel phones; one can play in public without carrying a game device more associated with children such as the Game Boy. New identities, such as the "wired urban nomad," are also developing which incorporate gaming in a way that fits into adulthood.

Greg Lastowka, an intellectual property lawyer, talked about the burgeoning field of law covering the virtual worlds of EverQuest, Ultima, the Sims, NeoPets and other role-playing games and simulations. He mentioned there.com and Second Life; these are basically online "worlds" which are mostly oriented towards women and girls. I was a little disgusted to find that in one of them, you can pay actual real-world money for virtual Levis to clothe your character (and then follow a link to buy the same actual clothes for your meatspace body).

Lastowka mentioned that some people involved in these worlds approach them as games, while others treat them more like worlds and places to explore. This is an interesting distinction for us to consider, I think; it places video gaming in a broader but related field of recreational virtual-world interaction, which is perhaps where we ought to be anyway if we want to consider interactions of bulletin boards, web surfing, simulations, and role-playing with games. I think a lot more may already have been written about non-game worlds like this from psychosocial perspectives, specifically Sherry Turkle's Life on the Screen and Janet Murray's Hamlet on the Holodeck.

Posted by me at 10:08 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Problem solving, critical thinking, and metacognition

I was pleased to see many members of CCTE's current doctoral cohort, when asked to develop hypothetical research questions the other day in our Thursday seminar, gravitating towards questions about problem-solving and metacognition! I think this is exciting, since I think it's a more interesting problem to tackle than lower-level education.

Can these skills be developed with video games? There seems to be a lot of established thought in our department about using simulations (CTELL, CNMTL's projects, general thinking about complex systems and mental models) to foster higher-order thinking. My hunch is that "games" (here referring to goal-oriented, playful software based around some central conflict, excluding simulation for the moment) will probably be better at teaching simple skills like reading and math, and at engaging participants on a social and emotional level. I suppose that remains to be seen. I guess one question is, to what extent can simulations be gamelike, or incorporated into games?

I'm thinking of researching how video gamers playing various genres of game develop metacognitive strategies to aid play, and looking into how their knowledge transfers to other games and possibly to other subjects. I know someone in John Black's research practicum the other day expressed interest in exploring how gamers choose different strategies for problem solving, as well...

Posted by me at 10:07 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

The field; play, work, and playfulness

How and where video games fit into academia is still very much up for grabs. This ambiguity surfaced a few times at the Princeton conference. Tevis Thompson, who did an insightful "close reading" of the game Super Mario Brothers at the conference, advocated that actually playing the games should remain part of studying them; he taked of critics using their "hand-eye" (analogous to a film-studies use of the "cino-eye") to make sense of what they are seeing onscreen.

David Thomas, a writer for the Denver Post and the game theory site buzzcut.com made a passionate case for maintaining an accessible vocabulary, mostly for the sake of keeping the players who have already contributed a great deal to game evolution involved in the development of the field.

I think it was Thomas who expressed concern that video game studies (or "ludology," as it is being called in some places -- Greek for the study of play) was in danger of being "colonized" by other disciplines. In informal discussion, a few conference attendees agreed, expressing annoyance that critical theorists and scholars in the field of cultural studies already seem to be making inroads into the discipline and cluttering it with esoteric jargon.

Some academic camps have made more claims to the discipline than others. There are apparently established schools of video-game thought in Italy and Scandinavia. Barry Atkins, a Principal Lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University, spoke out against what he saw as a tendency in these two camps to take all the fun out of games (witness their desire to name the field ludology rather than give it a more accessible title). The opening salvos fired by Atkins have led to some heated battle online.

Atkins expressed concern that games were often getting discussed in terms of labor, and made a case for maintaining a sense of the aesthetic pleasure of gaming within the academic study of games. The problem, as Atkins noted, is that this returns our discussions to the realm of subjectivity... never a position that academia finds defensible, and an especially difficult one for those of us in education under the Bush regime, with its ever-stricter demands for quantitative data.

A sorting out of play itself seems to be in order. John Voiklis, one of my TC peers, made the distinction between "play" and "playfulness" the other day in John Black's practicum. He pointed out that work can be like play, if we enjoy what we do and approach it in a spirit of creativity and fun. One distinction there, I guess, is that play-like work doesn't enjoy the social moratorium that actual play does. I personally am hoping to get some time to go back and look at the literature on play and its purposes in learning and society. I've already done some reading on creativity, mostly in the context of television, and this has touched on the subject.

Posted by me at 10:05 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

March 21, 2004

Finally: playing a new video game as "approaching a void"

Please note: this is now the *last* of ten posts about the Princeton conference. If you have reached this post because of the notes I sent out to my TC classes, you may want to start on the front page, or on the first post and navigate through using the topic-arrows under the banner at the top. Thanks for coming!

In absorbing everything I possibly can about what's going on in video games over the past few months, I found the assertion above in the work of two scholars -- James Gee and Kevin Leander. The idea that a player approaches a new video game as a "void" -- with no expectations for what gameplay will be like -- is surprisingly inaccurate coming from two smart dudes who spend a lot of time thinking about social contexts of computer-mediated experiences.

My feeling is that this idea arises from the gaming experience of a generation who came to games later in life. Those of us who grew up with Nintendos and home computer games generally come to a game with expectations about how we will be seen as game players, how the controller is going to work, what our aims are, and even some generalizations from other games about what the symbols we will see are going to mean (see MUSHROOM MAKE BIG!, above).

So! I hereby challenge any scholar who makes such a claim in the future to a game of Nintendo's Super Smash Brothers. While you are busy groping in the semantic void I'll be free to pick Princess Peach and still 0wn j00!!! ;)

Posted by me at 11:58 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

March 18, 2004

Before You Send Me That Forward


Recently I received the same email from two people -- one on CA-125, which is ostensibly supposed to screen for ovarian cancer. The email is largely in caps, and rather hysterical in tone, but two very smart women I know passed it on anyway. We're all susceptible to email hoaxes, no matter how smart we are; there's always some cause or plea or element of actual fact they're related to which makes us want to believe they're real. I, for example, forwarded the "They're going to defund Sesame Street!" email probably two times before I thought to check around to see if it was true.

My own policy is to check and see if there is a date associated with petition spam, in particular. I think any petition worth its snuff should be date-stamped, or it's likely to circulate on the Internet from now til society completely falls apart (two or three years from now). From here on in my plan is also going to be checking Snopes.com, at least, before I forward something. The site keeps track of urban legends, hysterical spam, and other rumors. Once you find the spam you're about to resend right next to an ancient rumor about immigrants getting free cars and tax breaks from the government, you feel a little silly, believe you me.

Posted by me at 1:13 PM | Comments (0)

March 8, 2004

The Other Homeschoolers


Four-year-old Patrick Henry College, a college for the Christian homeschooled, allows students to show affection on campus only by holding hands and has sent seven of its 240 students to be White House interns this year. You want apocalypse? Not the gay marriages, man -- those seven kids, they are signs of the apocalypse. Thanks to Chase's crew -- dude, you've got to scream a little louder when these stories come up. I mean, it's the apocalypse!

Posted by me at 11:47 PM | Comments (5)

March 4, 2004

Who Am I Reading With?: Genres And Audiences: Or, The Sudden Unwanted Appearance Of Colons In My Blog

Came up with an idea today to go back and refine an issue of Internet literacy I obsessed over earlier but didn't know how to position in the field. Some work has been done on children's understanding of genre and intended audience of television shows. It develops in stages, with children first being able to identify cartoons, Sesame Street, the news and a few other genres, then developing more complex genre schemas. In general, though, kids are pretty sophisticated in their understanding of genres. They are also good at identifying target audiences, as in "this is for kids" and "this is for adults." So as far as their understanding of the intended audience goes, they're pretty sharp.

But what about their understanding of themselves as a community of watchers? Who else do they think is watching the shows that they do? Do they think, "Everyone watches SpongeBob," "all kids watch SpongeBob but no adults do," or "some kids watch SpongeBob and some don't"? How do they specify to and among themselves the identities and social roles of watchers of various shows? And then, does this television understanding interact with or impact their understanding of the audience of Internet sites?

It's a weird way to work -- I feel like I developed all these questions earlier on and only now am I coming across a vocabulary and a literature I can draw on to make these questions acceptable to the larger academic community. (And heaven knows I have my own weird conceptions of who's in that community!) The really annoying thing is I'm still feeling so lost in the overwhelming sea of literature I'm being forced to drink that I don't have a moment to go back and read what I've been absorbing into my earlier questions. It was a complete accident that I thought of this at all.

Posted by me at 10:50 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

heteronormative bagel

And your attempt to inflict your heteronormative bagel on the toaster has met with resistance! --Jamie, on why the toaster burnt it

Posted by me at 10:32 PM

March 3, 2004

No Pants, No Chekhov


The fun page circulating at work today was from New York troupe Improv Everywhere: the Anton Chekhov is alive and well and living in DC stunt. Also, no pants. I am really impressed by these guys. I should join.

Posted by me at 10:51 PM | Comments (1)

The Bad Dream of Showing Up Naked

This semester will mark something totally new in my life. It will be the first time that my independent studies feel less desperate and disorganized than two out of three of my other courses. Sure, the independent study I'm undertaking is moving slowly and has its own share of frustrations, but at least it's moving, and for a change I feel quite confident it will show up on my record, both in terms of its contribution to my understanding of the field and in terms of my transcript.

The two totally disorganized classes both happen to cover the same body of research about television. I did not intend this to be the case. The older I get the more it becomes clear that professors can be just as inept at describing a body of knowledge as we are (hell, they're just older versions of us.) -- I asked about the classes, did my background research, picked up the syllabus and pored over it, and somehow I still managed to double up on the TV research. (In one case I blame the course title. I'm making a decree: no professor is hereby allowed to employ the word "Uses" as it relates to "media" or "information" unless s/he plans to give me a nice juicy dish of propaganda-machine entrails. My fault for falling for the same crappy use of the phrase two semesters running, I guess, but still.)

Despite the fact that I have two courses on TV research I can't help but feel I'm going to come out with no clearer a vision of the field than I had going in. In one class the teacher seems so unfamiliar with the field, and so poor at presenting the content, that I don't trust anything he assigns us.

In the other class, the professor means well, but in giving us room to study whatever we are most interested in, with no scaffolding to speak of, she's essentially doomed us to drinking from the firehose of research on television. She has done very little so far to help develop a picture of how the various theories fit together or are in opposition. Our fellow students are leading the discussions and making assignments, a practice I've hated since sixth grade with Mrs. Goldberg and her overhead projectors and algebra.

As a Hampshire grad I should relish this kind of learning, you say? Well, consider the fact that the situation is exacerbated by half the class being from a completely different department -- the health education department?! They don't have much background in the subject, seem to have a very narrow set of interests in the effects of television (violence, obesity/inactivity, and body image), and really, really aren't ready to handle a professor who hands you the firehose. Peer learning in the ideal would be great, and I love working with people with whom I can really riff, but I sure as he1l don't like to have people who know less than me writing my syllabus.

Friends, I tell you, my heart yearns to go off and do my own reading -- start prepping for papers I want to write about television, the Internet, celebrity,and perceptions of reality -- and d^mn the syllabus. But one thing holds me back: that nightmare of showing up for class unprepared.

There is nothing that makes me feel guiltier. Perhaps it's because of my primary prep school experience, with all of its insistence that your academic performance was the measure of your self-worth. Not being prepared in class made you a second-class citizen. Aside from the subjects I struggled in, I almost never went into a class without doing the homework.

It happened last week. In the class with the clueless professor (that first one), I showed up without having done a lick of the reading. I settled at the back of class, pulled out the laptop, and continued my self-tutorial in chess playing. But I figured I should get in the habit of piping up once or twice -- class participation, after all, contributes to my grade, and my grade contributes to my "academic progress," which, though it has nothing to do with progress as judged by a community of academic peers, still contributes to my standing in school, which affects my financial aid and my not being kicked out... but I digress...

So when the professor raised questions about the reading I hadn't done, I went ahead and commented anyway, feeling thoroughly reckless. His question was rather weak, something along the lines of "so, this writer posits that the book will continue to offer deeper thoughts than other media, what do you think, kids? should the book go away? wouldn't that be sad and bad for everyone?" and I said something about isn't this ironic when the big media conglorporations went ahead and bought up all the publishers some ten years back, and do you really think the book is going *away* when they're still able to turn such a profit on spinoff media like Martha Stewart craft guides and books based on movies? what do we mean by "book" anyway? and he harumphed and said well I'd have to see the statistics on that, and I thought to myself Mark Miller is in your department you dingwad, he does media ownership research, howabout you go over there and look into some of his figures for a change rather than pulling this stuff out of your a$s when you can't find it in the Times?

and then this girl in front of me pipes up and says Well what I FEEL like is that books offer me more of a community experience, that's what I FEEL like, and I said well what about the Internet, books offer you more of an opportunity to engage in a community than that?! and she said I was talking about BOOKS and how I FEEL about BOOKS I wasn't talking about the Internet and I nearly tore her a new one for being so impossibly vague and not having any literature to back her a$s up, but then blissfully I had to leave

so as you can see maybe the darkness of my uninformed soul was not pierced by the all-seeing judgement light of Academia but still I'm left with a bad taste in my mouth to associate with not doing my homework

sigh. today my idea is that I should leave all this behind -- especially seeing as we are about to lose our one professor who does work on TV, and don't really have anyone whose specialty is media literacy -- and go to England. Does anyone else have recommendations of other British schools? Or ones in Canada? Or Australia even? Or elsewhere?

While we're at it, what do you all think of this critique of media effects research?

Posted by me at 1:42 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

Today's serendipity


led me to articles on an outcast minority in Japan (Burakumin) and a animated musical piece from SIGGRAPH a few years ago.

Posted by me at 12:21 AM | Comments (0)